Player Features and Ideas Discussion

My point is unless you are being imprudent this is a non-issue for you. Now, if you are being deliberately imprudent and hauling large value cargo...well...then yeah, I can see how this would concern, but I'd argue you should change your behavior and such behavior should not receive and indirect buff.

4 billion can still be worth the gank and Goons have started ganking with stealth bombers so yeah, they are looking for the biggest whales.

And I am not saying a gank fleet is assuming as much risk, but if you think they should then you are just flat out wrong.

I can tell you from personal experience that miniluv will not form for some 4b freighter you have bumped unless its red or has some interesting cargo.

I agree that haulers have the sole responsibility for making sure they are taking the proper precautions such as scouting, using intel channels, webbing frigates, and more.

You just dont make sense because using containers doesnt make you less likely to get ganked. Its not a method of defense or deterrance.

The point Ima is making is that your premises are flawed. The reason you state for your change is that "[t]he actual ganking and scooping process is far too easy and the potential reward (especially when being picky with targets and having a decent threshold for gsnks like Miniluv does) is very out of balance when you look at the overall risk of ganking stsrting with the first bump, to the final scopping of the loot." The reality is that CCP cannot balance these risks as they are completely determined by the actions of players. Once CCP sets the basic rules of how piracy is done in highsec, it is the potential victim that completely determines the rewards for the pirate.

If CCP chooses to raise the bar to gank a freighter, like they have done multiple times over the years, does ganking stop? No, it doesn't as haulers will just adapt to the current situation and increase the value of their cargo. This is just basic game theory which all of us do consciously or subconsciously all the time when we play the game. If the perceived risk of doing something, like hauling, goes down more people will shove more ISK into the hauler giving a similar amount of targets for the pirates.

From a purely rational assessment of risk/effort vs. reward, we are way beyond the point in hauling where everyone should just haul everything AFK all the time (under a reasonable ISK limit of course). The New Order does its best to inject some risk to all freighters, but the chance of you losing an empty or sub-billion ISK freighter to a gank is not worth considering (unless you are breaking one of the golden rules and flying something you cannot afford to lose). You are much better off to spend your time AFKing them around while you watch a movie which is a failure of game design but beyond the scope of this thread.

Implementing this because you think gankers get too much reward is flawed and a waste of time. As a thought experiment let's say CCP implemented an 'NPC anti-ganker' that showed-up 50% the time and doomsdayed the ganking fleet's hauler and the loot (maybe they could give them names of some the failed anti-gankers that left the game?). All that would happen is that Miniluv would change their calculation and instead of shooting freighters that have X B ISK in cargo, they would now shoot freighters with 2X B ISK (probably a little more than 2 times) in cargo. Immediately, this would be a straight out nerf, and cut ganking of freighters significantly, but over time haulers would adapt to the safety noticing that they can put more and more cargo into their ships without problem, until one day they cross this unseen new threshold and lose twice as much to the same gankers and we are back to the same place with carebears claiming things are "unbalanced", with the gankers killing even more ISK per gank.

CCP cannot balance this as carebears will eventually react to any buff in safety by hauling more, and arguably each time they raise the difficulty to attack a freighter, they make the situation worse. Perhaps as you say inflation means that the bar to attack does need to go up over time to allow haulers to carry more, but we are well into the range of absurdity where it takes dozens of people to attack a simple undefended hauler in this game, and ships carrying > 10 or 20B ISK are ganked routinely.

Now, all that said, I did say before I agree with your proposal. Implementing this in an effort to "balance" risk vs. reward for highsec pirates as you want to do is foolish and doomed to failure, but implementing this as part of an effort to generate more content is something I think worthwhile. The problem is implementing this in a way that does generate more conflict and content is intractable, or at least a major undertaking involving a significant amount of work both 'under the hood' for the game to track stolen goods better, and on a game design level to prevent looters from just using another method to launder the goods. The reality is that freighter ganking is a niche activity, responsible for only a tiny fraction of the content, and is not likely to see the development time necessary to fix all the other ways players can loot safely while ensuring no exploitable holes to make innocents inadvertently go suspect.

Honestly, the whole highsec criminality mechanics need a complete rethink. So much could be done to build game play around crime, smuggling, stolen goods, bounty hunting and so forth, but most of it is hampered by players hiding behind CONCORD which prevents so much escalation. Maybe highsec is going to always be doomed as a content-poor space where player interaction is stifled by over-powered NPCs, but I'd like to think there is a better way CCP might someday get around to figuring out.

Anyways, the TL;DR of all this I think with this 'nerf freighter ganking' idea you are exhibiting traits of what James 315 refers to as one of "The Jealous", with perhaps a bit of "The Knee-Jerker" thrown in. Just because something interesting is happening and some people are profiting from it does not automatically mean there needs to be a nerf. I do agree with you in principle looting mechanics could be redesigned to support more of a chance of escalation of conflict, but it is not a simple problem to solve and one fraught with opening holes for players to trick other players into going suspect. You however have not presented a simple idea to improve this mechanic, nor even a good reason why it does need to be fixed so I predict CCP to not ever move on this, at least in isolation.

CCP cant and shouldnt ever limit what a hauler can carry in terms of value, but what CCP can do is look at the current level of risk on the gankers side and see that its situational at best. Look at the specific situations where there is significant risk and you will find that its very infrequent. So infrequent that you could say that most of the gankers assume no real risk.

I have no issues with the value that is being hauled or how much isk can be made from ganking. This isnt about one more nerf to ganking, and yes I understand that it effects ganking but it also effects neutral looters no associated with any sort of ganking at all. The responses I keep getting back are how its just another nerf, in which poor evidence or examples are given that I continue to debunk and address.

This is just as easily a nerf to the guy using his DST to scoop loot from wrecks involved in a wardec. The undisputable fact is that its a broken mechanic that is mostly uncounterable outside of having enough alpha on hand to gank it, and thats not a reasonabke counter at all.

Because you are not using them. Same with web alts, escort logi, scouts, breaking your expensive load into smaller cheap loads and so on.

I recall the ice interdictions and all of the bitching by miner over how easy it was to kill them for profit. We are talking multiple threads every day for months on end. The reality was that out of 600 exhumers we killed in the first 2 weeks of the caldari ice interdiction not a single one fitted a tank.

If you don't use the tools available then you wont see their benefit. Load your junk into a freight container and force gankers to use a freighter to scoop the loot.

Miniluv is the best example of ganking for profit in the current meta. This is about ganking, but Miniluv is the perfect example.

This isnt about CCP stepping in to nerf ganking. Once.... Again.... I will..... Repeat.... Myself.... This is a call to CCP to change the way you can circumvent the real consequences of crimwatch by going suspect with a worthless ship, placing loot into a DST thst would normally flag you as suspect.

So yes CCP does need to step in because the sandbox will be better balanced from a risk averse form of bypassing crimewatch to loot.

So if this change goes through and instead of gankers using DSTs to look, going suspect for you to shoot at... It will still give you something to shoot at because they will use another ship if the choose to. The point is that the ship will go suspect, which is the way it should be. If it was me i would use a DST when the situation arose. The size cargo it can hold is still something that would make it the superior ship, even before you factor in superior stats and not being forced to fit cargo expanders.

So get promoting then. When people ask for hauling advice tell them to use them.

As I said, haulers have tools, that they do not use them is not the fault of the gankers.

Again, that is not a mechanics issue it is a behavioral issue with players doing the hauling. Players who get ganked with over filled freighters are not simply imprudent they are ignorant of game mechanics. Trying to balance game mechanics due to unsound player actions is foolish and antithetical to the very nature of this game.